35. Lucy #2
Hadley headed toward the coaches’ offices, and Dottie watched her go with mild betrayal, as if she could not understand why every nice person did not immediately move into my office and devote themselves to her.
By ten, my inbox had become an avalanche of offseason tasks.
Exit physical documentation. Player travel schedules.
Summer contact updates. Housing transitions.
Equipment return confirmations. Media availability adjustments.
Staff calendar shifts. The entire machinery of a professional hockey team changing gears with no mercy for feelings.
I worked because work was easier than waiting.
I answered emails. Updated spreadsheets.
Made calls. Approved a revised offseason access schedule.
Sent three reminders about returning team-issued tablets that would absolutely be ignored by at least two grown men who could hit a moving puck at ninety miles per hour but could not locate a charging cord if their lives depended on it.
Every so often, Dottie lifted her head toward the hallway.
Every so often, I did not look.
At ten forty-seven, I heard footsteps stop outside my door.
Dottie was on her feet before I could breathe. Her whole body changed. Not the general interest she gave anyone who might have hands or snacks. This was recognition. Pure, immediate, silly joy. Her tail started wagging so hard her back end went with it.
My heart did one humiliating, painful thing against my ribs.
Then Ty appeared in my doorway.
He wore a suit. Not a game-day suit with the bright focus of a man heading into noise.
Not the polished, easy armor he wore when cameras were part of the job.
This suit was dark navy, slightly rumpled at the elbows, his tie pulled loose enough to show the top button of his white shirt open at his throat.
His hair looked like he had dragged his fingers through it too many times. His eyes were tired.
In one hand, he held my coffee. In the other, he held Dottie’s pup cup.
He looked like warmed-over shit on toast.
Dottie made a noise I had never heard from her before, somewhere between a sob and a celebration, and launched herself toward him.
Ty’s face changed when he looked down at her. “Hey, girl,” he said quietly, lowering the pup cup before she lost her entire mind. “Yeah. I know. I’m late.”
I stood behind my desk, one hand braced on the edge, every word I knew suddenly somewhere else.
He crouched carefully, suit pants pulling at his knees, and let Dottie press her face into the cup. His hand settled between her shoulders, broad and gentle.
“I told you,” I sighed to my dog, because apparently my mouth had decided to function without supervision, “that he wasn’t coming.”
Ty looked up at me. There were shadows under his eyes. “Sorry to make you a liar.”
“You had an exit meeting?” I asked.
“Not until noon.”
My fingers tightened on the desk. “You came early.”
“Yeah.”
“For this?”
He stood, slower than usual, and held the coffee out to me. I crossed the room to take it. The cup was warm against my palm. Paper Lantern. My usual order. The same little sticker Naomi used when she was feeling smug, a tiny gold star pressed near the lid.
“I figured the morning after a bad night still counted as a morning,” he muttered.
My throat tightened.
Outside my office, someone shut a locker-room door hard enough for the sound to carry.
Ty flinched almost imperceptibly.
“You don’t have to pretend you’re okay,” I said.
For a second, the hallway seemed to empty around us. The whole arena reduced itself to rain-streaked windows, old ice, my dog licking whipped cream from her nose, and Ty Burns standing at the edge of my office with a loss sitting heavy on his shoulders.
His eyes came back to mine. “I’m not.”
The honesty was quiet enough to hurt.
I swallowed. “Do you want to come in for a minute?”
“Yeah, sure.” Ty stood near the door at first, careful even with permission. He looked around my office the way people did when they realized a room had changed while they were not watching. “It looks good in here,” he said.
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m not.” His gaze moved over the lamp, the bookshelves, the framed brunch photo, Dottie’s bed. “It feels like you.”
I turned toward my desk and busied myself with absolutely nothing.
He did not sit until I nodded toward the chair across from mine.
Even then, he lowered himself into it like he expected someone to tell him he had misunderstood.
His knees were too long for the space. His shoulders filled too much of the room.
The navy suit made his eyes look painfully blue and his exhaustion harder to miss.
Ty stared at his hands. The old Ty had always known what to do with silence. Fill it. Charm it. Turn it into something easy before it could become honest. This Ty let it sit.
“Was it bad?” I asked finally.
He rubbed his thumb over the knuckle of his other hand. “Last night was bad.” His jaw flexed. “I had a chance in the second,” he growled. “Clean. Should’ve buried it.”
“Ty.”
“And I took a bad angle on their third.”
“You were not the only player on the ice.”
“No.” His voice stayed even. “But I was one of them.”
I did not know what to do with that. Comfort felt too intimate. Dismissing it felt cruel. Letting it stand felt like leaving him alone in it. I wrapped both hands around my coffee. “My father was upset for all of you,” I said.
Ty looked up.
“He won’t say it like that,” I added. “He’ll say something about offseason evaluation and organizational growth because he has a disease that prevents normal emotional vocabulary before noon.”
Ty’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Sounds like him.”
“He believes in this team.”
“I know.”
“He believes in you.”
Ty looked away toward the window. For a moment, the rain reflected in his eyes and made them look brighter than they were. “I don’t know if I earned that last night.”
There were so many things I could have said.
That one game did not define him. That hockey was brutal.
That everyone missed chances. That the world did not end because a puck hit a post. But Ty did not need me to hand him a motivational poster.
So I said, “Maybe you don’t have to earn it every single night for it to be real. ”
The sentence hung between us, too big for hockey and too close to everything else.
His eyes came back to mine slowly.
I looked down at my cup. “I had a good time with you at the baby shower.” I forced myself to keep going, because if I stopped there, I would turn it into less than it was. “With Dottie. And the kids. And Bobby. The whole stroller disaster.”
A little breath left him, almost a laugh but not quite. “That was a disaster.”
“You handled it well.”
“The stroller had a vendetta.”
“The stroller was innocent. The Frosthawks were the problem.”
“That’s usually true,” he said. “I had a good time too.”
My guard did not fall. But something in it loosened. A latch, maybe. One I had kept closed so long I had mistaken the pressure for safety.
My phone buzzed again on my desk, breaking the moment. I glanced at the screen.
Naomi: WELL?
I ignored it.
Ty’s gaze flicked to my phone, then away, giving me back the room before I had to ask for it.
“I should let you work.” He made it to the door before he paused.
Not for me. For Dottie, because apparently both of us were cowards in different directions.
“See you later, Dottie Girl,” he said, his voice dropping into that soft, ridiculous register she had somehow earned from him.
“Thanks for the coffee, Ty,” I managed.
It came out too small for what I meant. Thank you for coming. Thank you for still coming. Please don’t leave yet.
Dottie wagged from the rug, unashamed.
For one strange second, I saw him as he had been at eighteen, standing beside a lake with summer in his hair and my heart in his hands. Then I blinked and saw him now: older, tired, bruised by a loss, choosing to stand in my office on a morning when nothing required him to be there.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
The second he disappeared down the hall, my phone buzzed again.
Naomi: A regular came in. He looked like someone had emotionally drop-kicked him through a playoff bracket.
Naomi.
Naomi: I remain committed to making him suffer on your behalf.
Naomi: But I’m impressed with your resolve, because on my end, this man is making it inconvenient to stay mad at him.
I sat in my quiet office with my coffee warm in my hands and Dottie asleep on the rug, pup cup crushed under one paw like a trophy.
Inconvenient. That was one word for it. Terrifying was another.
Because the question inside me had started to change when I was not looking.
For months, it had been: Is this real?
Every coffee. Every threshold. Every moment he left before I had to ask him to. Every small act had pressed against that question until the shape of it wore down.
Now a different question waited underneath.
What happens if I let myself love him again?
By late afternoon, the rain had cleared and the arena windows glowed with that golden almost-summer light that made even concrete look forgiving.
The building had emptied in stages. Players left with their bags.
Staff drifted between offices with end-of-season paperwork tucked under their arms. The media room went dark.
The family lounge smelled faintly of old popcorn and lemon cleaner.
Someone had turned off the music that usually played low near the concourse, and the silence left behind felt enormous.
I was sorting through summer access forms when my dad appeared in my doorway without knocking.
He never knocked in buildings he owned. It was one of his more irritating traits, and also one of the ways I knew he was my father beyond biology. He entered spaces like he had already measured the load-bearing walls and decided he could improve them.
He stopped just inside my office and looked around.
I braced myself. “If you’re going to comment on the lamp, I’ll have you removed by security.”
His eyebrows lifted.